Blog Your Blessings Sunday: Forsythia

Forsythia is in full bloom this week. While Adella was at soccer practice on Thursday, I walked around Woodbury, Connecticut, and photographed some of this wonderful, wild life.

It is the bad hair of the spring garden in so many ways, going where it wants, when it wants, and how that it is usually the outcast in the corner. As a gardener, you face it in the way my father used to remind us to face the weekly meatloaf: you learn to love it.

This border plant is the nexus of all seasons: its yellow promises the bright warmth of summer, but beneath its arching branches you see the detritus of autumn: last year's leaves that have become ghostlike, older ones that are skeletal. There are twigs, the remains of mice that lost their way when the snow came fast, debris trapped in this dream catcher that insists on beauty. If it becomes your job to clean out the leaves and debris, you feel the cold of winter in the recently thawed earth as you scrape the brittle old stuff with your hands. It's never a quick job, but you hope it will be, so you have no gloves.

At our home in Danbury, we had a clump of it near our garage. This was an old house with a magical yard of strange gardens and little crawl spaces and walls. It seemed to me the bushes must hold some buried treasure--old milk bottles, pottery shards, bottle caps off of which the earth had polished the names. Perhaps an old brooch or gold coin bringing stories and secrets from some other world.

I never found such things. Only the gold and the magic on rainy spring days when the yellow catches your eye and you think for a minute the sun is out. And then you remember the rain and look again and know that, yes, the sun is out.

Forsythia is beautiful.